


Would Robot Eyes Rust if They Cried?

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aging, Artificial Intelligence, Blow Jobs, Cock Warming, Comic Book Science, Cuddling & Snuggling, Death, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:27:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25039993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony has grown old while his lovers have remained young and strong. But neither Steve nor Bucky are willing to say goodbye. After an injury in the field leads him to consider the issue of his own impending death, he decides to preserve himself as an AI who can be just as ageless as his super soldiers.But such an extreme personal transformation comes with a steep learning curve.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 7
Kudos: 55
Collections: Marvel Polyship Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Bingo 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo Adopted Square: Helen Cho, Card #3004

Tony hated to ruin a perfectly good candlelit dinner with his boyfriends, but he’d learned there were some conversations it was better to have than to avoid until there was no time to really talk, and this was sure to be one of those conversations. Besides, the backless hospital gown and the crinkly hospital bed he was sitting up in had already kind of ruined it. 

He leaned back against the pillow Steve had placed against the small of his back to help him sit comfortably upright on the bed and looked across the collapsible table the two of them had hauled into the Tower medical suite as soon as the nurses had given them the okay. Bucky had covered it with a nice tablecloth he’d swiped from somewhere and lit pretty little golden candles, but there wasn’t much he could do to interrupt that particular unpleasant hospital atmosphere. On the other side, Steve and Bucky sat flush up against each other, Bucky leaning a little on Steve shoulder, both a little sleepy now that they’d had a chance to fill their bottomless stomaches. 

He’d put this conversation off for too long already. 

“Steve. Bucky. Loves of my lives,” he started. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I am an old man.”

“Oh ho ho!” Bucky snorted. “And here I thought Steve and I were the ancient ones in this relationship. What happened to all those jokes about Steve’s old man clothes?”

Tony smiled. “I stand by them, one hundred percent. You’ve gotta evolve with the times, Steve. It’s not even like you have an excuse anymore. You’ve been in the future what, thirty years at this point? Forty? More than that? It’s hard to keep track when you look the same today as you did when SHIELD defrosted you. So many hot new trends have come and gone, like waves breaking uselessly against the shore of your stubborn lack of fashion sense.

“But that’s not what I’m talking about, and I think you know it.”

He took a deep breath. 

“I’m an old man, and one of these days I’m going to die.”

“Tony-” Steve started, already settling into his  _ fight me _ face. 

“It’s true, Steve, don’t try and pretend like I haven’t turned all grey and wrinkly like some sort of clam. Not everyone can be as eternally youthful as you two.”

He, Bruce, and Helen Cho hadn’t come to a complete agreement yet about just how much and in what ways the Serum had slowed down the Super Soldiers’ aging process, but they knew it was a lot. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Steve didn’t look hardly a year older than he had the day he came out of the Vita Ray chamber, even though decades had passed, both in the ice and out.

“So, in the spirit of honesty and communication, we need to have a chat about what’s going to happen when this tired old body finally kicks the bucket.”

“No,” Steve said. His arm muscles twitched like he wanted to overturn the table.

“Steve, honey, I’m going to need you to be reasonable about this. You can’t punch death, and I doubt the process of aging is as easily swayed by your rippling biceps as I am.”

He took a deep breath, wished he could let this whole thing dissolve into a nothing fight, and that he and Steve could just take turns coming up with witticisms, and then forged on ahead. 

“Look. Why aren’t we having this romantic meal at a real restaurant? Because my body is falling apart. And it’s going to keep falling apart until eventually something vital stops working. And there’s nothing anyone can realistically do to change that. 

“We have a couple of options. Well, two, really. We could just let nature take its course, we have a fun last couple of years, I die, you guys make sure the funeral is an absolute party, you mourn, our trio becomes a pair, you two get married or something and eventually move on.”

“How can you say that?” Bucky demanded. “We’re not going to just  _ get over _ you.”

“Or,” Tony continued, “I could try and scan my brain or make an AI of myself or something in the time I have left. Then I die, you guys are no longer in charge of making sure the funeral is fun because I’ll be there to get the party started, you guys get used to the new and exciting forms my consciousness takes, and we our trio endures for ages to come.”

Steve and Bucky sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then, they exploded in unison. 

“That one.”

“What do you  _ mean, _ scan your brain?”

“Absolutely that one. 

“Would you have, like, a body? Or would you just be like JARVIS?”

Steve reached across the table to grasp Tony’s hand. His thick fingers nearly pinched the few wires taped to Tony’s skin, before he remembered at the last moment to avoid them. He met Tony’s eyes solemnly.

“What do you need to get started? Is there anything Buck and I can do to help?”

“Not much you guys  _ can _ do, really. Neither of you are hotshots with a computer, and unless you’ve been holding back on me about a theoretical neuroscience degree, there’s not a whole lot of non-tech work for you to do.”

He glanced at Bucky, whose eyebrows had curled inwards and wrinkled his forehead. Fatigue and puzzlement lined his face, and he stared at Tony like he had just proposed an absurd puzzle. 

“Tony,” he said, “Don’t try and sugar coat it so it seems like the obvious option, okay? What would the end result be?”

“Bucky-” Steve interjected. 

“No, Steve. I want to hear what he has to say. It sounds to me like he’s offering us a miracle just when we need it. I’m not saying I don’t trust his coding or anything like that. At this point, if Tony said he could make something, I’m prepared to believe him, no matter how outlandish it may sound. But that doesn’t mean the end result is going to be what you’re picturing right now.”

Bucky’s eyes stayed locked on Tony’s as he said this. Strange, terrifying emotions flickered like shadows across his face. 

Tony looked away first. 

“Some of the tech is still in the testing stages, of course. But I’m confident I can get it to work, with some help from Dr. Helen Cho for the less mechanical components. I’d likely have to convince her to let me borrow her Cradle, for starters.”

He’d considered using the Cradle to embody an artificial consciousness before, even gone so far as to offer Jarvis a chance to talk with Dr. Cho herself. But then he’d gotten distracted by other work, and Jarvis had claimed that since he had been born without a body and lived a lifetime without one, he wasn’t really interested now. 

And now here he was. 

“The basic plan would be for me to take a variety of scans of my brain, at different points during the day, possibly even for entire days if I can get the scanners small enough to fit on some sort of headset. These scans would be fed as data streams into an artificial intelligence construct, modelled after Jarvis’s initial base code. There would be scans for memories, scans for emotional connections and of my dreams and what chemicals my brain releases when I drink coffee and anything else I can possibly think of. Taken together, hung of the scaffolding of Jarvis’s old pro-consciousness learning framework, I would eventually have an AI of myself.”

Steve’s eyes had started to glaze over, even though Tony had tried to eliminate as many technical terms as possible from his explanation. Bucky, however, maintained his lazer-focus on Tony’s words. 

“After that point, any plans would depend on Dr. Cho’s willingness to collaborate with me. While she has expressed an interest in the past in attempting to create an artificial body for an AI of some sort, since then she’s mostly worked on creating seamlessly-attachable prosthetics and rejection-proof organs.”

He was pretty sure she’d say yes. She was a scientist after his own heart- always pushing the boundaries of what was possible, always actively working towards her envisioned future. 

“If she agreed, we would work together to make a body for my AI self. This artificial body would be more humanoid than a robot, of course, but still synthetic. Kind of like an LMD, but with some custom changes. Theoretically, that synthetic body would last as long as you two will, even with your glacial aging pace.”

He looked Bucky square in the eye. 

“It would not be a perfect copy of me. It can’t be. The process of converting a human person to a disembodied AI and then into a semi-embodied robot with a synthetic, non-human body will require, at the very least, enormous structural changes and accommodations. That’s the catch you’re looking for, Robocop.  _ Unavoidable changes to the structure of my brain. _ Can you live with that?”

Bucky was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, short and final. 

“Can  _ you _ live with it, Tony?”

“Yes.”

“Then so can I.”

* * *

Helen Cho said yes. 

Well, what she actually said was “I’ll start packing up the Cradle for shipping this weekend. How long will it take to integrate your scans into a functioning consciousness model?” But that was basically the same thing. 

"Wait until he's fully out of the hospital first!" Bucky shouted from the background. "Tony got blasted out of the sky just two days ago. He's not off concussion watch yet."

"I'll start sending you data as soon as I can," Tony said. 

* * *

He started walking around the house with the scanners on a headset that fit around his head like a crown. Bucky gave them wary looks the first couple of times he caught sight of them. When Tony asked, he said he could hear the little electric hum they made as they worked. 

“It clashes with the arc reactor hum,” he said. “It’s kind of disconcerting to listen to.”

Tony couldn’t hear anything, but Steve confirmed it when he got back from his morning run.

“It’s not too bad though. You barely even notice if you’re not listening for it,” he assured Tony. “Bucky’s just always listening for it.”

“What can I say?” Bucky said easily. “I like it that you come with a light-up, audible proof-of-life indicator.”

He pressed a kiss to Tony’s forehead, between two blinking nodes held firmly against his temples, then pulled away and ghosted out the door. 

“I didn’t know he had anything scheduled for today,” Tony said. “Jarvis, I thought Murderbot’s morning was clear for breakfast, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Sergeant Barnes has no official appointments today,” Jarvis replied. “If he has an itinerary for the day, he has not shared it with me.”

“It’s okay, Tony,” Steve said. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from him. “I think he’s gone to therapy.”

_ Going to therapy _ was how Bucky jokingly referred to his silent walks through different parts of the city. It didn’t matter which city, just that Bucky had visited it during his tenure as the Winter Soldier. When people used to bring it up, Bucky would claim he was working up to seeing a shrink, but it had been obvious to anyone who knew him even then that his leeriness of therapists, neurosurgeons, or anyone else who worked with the brain professionally was not going away anytime soon. Steve eventually talked him into doing some sort of art therapy that Sam had turned him onto, and that worked out well enough. But Bucky never referred to those meetings as  _ therapy. _

“I see,” Tony said. “Any idea where he’s going today?”

Back when they’d first gotten together and Bucky had  _ gone to therapy _ much more often, Tony had accompanied him a couple of times. There was no rhyme or reason that he could see to his wanderings; one time he meandered through a famers market on a bright, sunny summer day, out in the open and in an upscale part of the city, and the next time he hung out in the subway tunnels getting wet and filthy and avoiding all human eyes. 

“He didn’t say,” Steve shrugged. 

Tony looked down at his omelette and tried to not worry about it. Bucky just felt the urge to go sometimes, and it didn’t hurt or even really inconvenience anyone. His sudden need to go today wasn’t necessarily connected to Tony starting the physical brain scans. 

But that didn’t mean they weren’t connected, either. 

He shoveled the rest of the eggs into his mouth, then hopped up and walked around the table to scramble into Steve’s lap. 

“What are you doing, Tony?” Steve laughed. “There are seven perfectly good chairs for you to sit on.”

“Mmm, but none of them quite compare to your lap, Captain Comfortable.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but wrapped an arm around Tony’s torso to secure him against his chest while leaving the other hand free to eat his eggs. His body was warm against Tony’s, and the sun was streaming in through the window behind them, making the whole chair glow with heat. The warm afterglow of the eggs still lingered on his tongue. Even though Bucky wasn’t here to share it, it was a pretty good moment. 

Pressed at irregular intervals around his skull, little scanners watched his brain savor it. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony starts working on converting himself into an AI. He runs into a few non-technical stumbling blocks along the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo, Card #027-Peter Parker

Tony faced his death head-on. He had Pepper file reams and reams of paperwork for all kinds of eventualities; he picked out a date on the calendar and sent it to Dr. Cho for confirmation; he made little updates and tweaks to his neuromodel at least twice daily, keeping track of the changes in exhaustive documentation pages linked to the code itself. 

“Would you like a tomb stone for the body?” Tony asked one day over breakfast. 

Steve froze with a spoonful of cereal halfway to his mouth. On the other side of the kitchen, Bucky just about turned to stone.

“What?”

“Do you want a tombstone for my body after it dies? We’re going to have to do something with it afterwards, after all. I’m happy to just cremate myself and have the ashes flung into the ocean, but you might have a different opinion on things.”

Steve looked troubled. 

"Do we have to decide that right away? I know you haven't been well recently, but it's not like you're going to keel over and die tomorrow, right?"

"I wouldn't be so sure of that, Cap." He gestured at his grey hair and wrinkled forehead. "It's all down hill from here, after all. Even if there weren't a laundry list of fun new ailments in my medical record, it would be time to start talking about this."

“Have you talked to Pepper and Colonel Rhodes about it?” Steve pressed. 

Tony recognized a sidestep when he saw one. 

“Yeah, Pepper especially had a bunch of thoughts. One of those thoughts was that I should talk to  _ you two _ about it. So, do  _ you _ want a grave for the body?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bucky give a full-body shiver. 

“No,” Steve said slowly, “I don’t think we’ll need one. Your other idea-cremation- that’s probably better. You won’t be dead, only your body will, right?  _ Tony Stark _ won’t be dead.”

He glanced at Bucky for support. Bucky stared very hard at the kitchen wall, which kept the back of his head facing Steve. The silence dragged on into the realm of discomfort as he waited for Bucky to say something. 

Tony glanced between the two of them. He hadn’t realized Bucky was still apprehensive about the plan- he’d seemed in agreement back at the hospital. 

“Better not,” Steve finally finished lamely. He gave up waiting for Bucky to chime in and stared down at his cereal with a troubled expression. 

Tony beat a retreat to his workshop to fiddle a bit more with the neuromodel and escape the gloomy atmosphere that had descended on the kitchen. 

* * *

Figuring out what to tell the kids was hard.

In his many years as a superhero, he’d picked up quite a few mentees and proteges. Many of them weren’t even really kids anymore. They had grown up, graduated and had adult lives of their own now. Many of them didn’t even live within easy travel distance of the Tower anymore. For those, he’d have to set up a time to call so he could break the news to them that he wasn’t in the best of health, and that he was going to undergo an experimental medical treatment to address it, and no they shouldn’t fly out to see him, he just wanted to let them know in case it went wrong or there were unforeseen long-term effects. 

But the ones who still lived in New York he told in person. 

They took it pretty well. The words  _ Tony Stark _ and  _ experimental technology _ fit together easily, after all, and they were young enough to delude themselves into thinking death wasn’t coming for them or anyone they personally knew. 

His older proteges were a little quicker on the uptake. 

“Mr. Stark, what’s wrong?” Peter asked as soon as he mentioned surgery. “Is it the arc reactor? I thought you had surgery to get it taken out, like, a billion years ago. Why is it still a problem if you already-”

“Slow down, kid, slow down. I did have the original reactor taken out. I had to get a new one put in a while back when my heart started talking back. Felt like someone was playing the drums in my chest, not a pleasant sensation at all. But this is not about the arc reactor.”

That didn’t seem to calm Peter down any. 

“Then what’s wrong Mr. Stark?”

“Come on, Peter, we’re both adults. Isn’t it about time you started calling me Tony? You make me feel even older than I really am.”

Peter just stared at him, lips pressed into a tight line like he was a high schooler all over again, waiting for Tony’s reaction to an unauthorized mission that had gone south. It was disconcerting to see that look on his older face. 

“I’ve been sick, recently,” he started. “Nothing too bad, for the most part. They’ve got me taking a couple of pills the size of horse tranquilizers every morning, and the symptoms are mostly under control.” He flashed back to the hospital bed and the sad little candles his boyfriends had set up on the thin little plastic table at his bedside to cheer him up. “But kid, it’s not the sort of sickness you get better from.”

“What?” Peter asked breathlessly. Like Tony’s words had knocked the breath out of him. 

“I’m old, Peter. The new interns are so used to seeing me with grey hair, they don’t even recognize the old photos of me anymore. The doctors use fun new terms like ‘future hospice care candidate’ and ‘normal for men your age.’ Jarvis had to write a new subroutine to filter out all the come-ons I get in the mail trying to get me to buy a plot in a graveyard. And the coffin makers! You’d think they had nothing better to do than to try and convince me to go for a coffin that would make those old Egyptian Pharaohs green with envy.”

He clapped Peter on the shoulder. 

“What I’m trying to say is, my body has outlived the original warranty, and I’m going to have to do a little DIY fixing to get it in working order again. And like all DIY projects, I might end up painting the windows shut or shooting myself in the foot with the staple gun. I just thought you should know now, so it doesn’t come as a surprise later.”

Thankfully, Steve chose that moment to come back from his trip to the bakery down the street that sold Tony’s favorite muffins. Peter tried to stay on topic, but Tony successfully diverted the conversation away from his health problems for the rest of his visit. 

* * *

It turned out to be a good thing that he’d told the kids in advance. 

Two days after letting everyone know he was preparing for some sort of surgery for an intentionally vague malady, while Steve was warming up some hot chocolate for them to share while they waited for Bucky to get back from a mission briefing Tony had predicted would run late, he had a heart attack in the kitchen. 

His only warning was a feeling of tightness in his chest. He thought nothing of it- even after having the arc reactor removed, his chest had always felt a little tight. Then the ache of it spread to his neck and jaw, and he suddenly felt a little dizzy. 

_ Oh no,  _ he thought. 

And then he was on the floor and clutching his chest. Steve dropped the mug full of hot chocolate he was holding and rushed to his side. The ceramic edges of it made a  _ ping _ noise as they hit the tiling before exploding into a spray of sharp pieces. Tony could distantly feel some of the hot liquid seeping into his pant leg. 

The scanners secured to his temples lit up like Christmas lights.

“Jarvis, help!” Steve barked. 

“Medical personnel are en route, Captain Rogers,” Jarvis said. “Please be ready to assist them in transporting Sir to the medical bay.”

The next thing Tony knew, he was trying to open his eyes without the aid of his fingers to wipe away the sleep-griminess that held them shut. He was familiar enough with waking up in the hospital, at this point, to know not to jostle his hands too much. Sure enough, he could feel a variety of little wires taped to his fingers. 

Cool metal pressed against his forearm. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Tony,” Bucky said. He sounded tired. 

“I’d say it’s nice to be back, but honestly it’s not,” Tony whined. “I feel awful, and my throat is doing it’s best Sahara Desert impression, which I’m sure means I’m going to feel nauseous the second I get my hands on some coffee.”

He raised one hand until he felt a light pressure as the thin tubes pulled taut against his skin. Range of movement thus determined, he ran a hand over his face. 

“Ugh, this is going to push my whole schedule back. Jarvis, email Dr. Cho for me will you, let her know why I’ve got to push the date for the next test back, will you?”

“Already done, Sir,” Jarvis replied through the speakers on Tony’s phone, which sat on the table beside his bed. 

He opened his mouth to ask Jarvis if he’d lost access to the wall speakers somehow when something warm pressed against his bottom lip. 

“I figured you’d want some of this when you woke up. I had Steve grab you some while he was downstairs putting the fear of Captain America into SHIELD’s newest generation of baby agents.” 

Bucky ran a metal finger gently over Tony’s fluttering eyelashes, wiping them clear of grime and letting him open his eyes properly. 

“Why, pray tell, am I in a SHIELD medical facility instead of my own, infinitely superior one?”

Bucky sighed.

“Dr. Cho was already using most of yours. She claimed it wasn’t safe to let anyone in without protective gear while she was still working on the ‘radiation problem.’”

Tony grimaced. He’d forgotten all about his invitation to Dr. Cho to make use of his unique med system to work out the few remaining kinks in her chemicals-to-crazy-synthetic-flesh process. The whole place was probably one big biohazard. 

“So, what’s the diagnosis? Why do I feel so terrible?”

“Heart attack,” Bucky replied. 

Tony groaned and sank back down into his pillow. That made the sensors still taped to his forehead press more insistently against his skull. He reached up and tapped them gently to ensure they were still working.

“Good thing no one removed these. It’s hard to clean up and recover so much weirdly-formatted, complex data. I had to make up a whole new file format for this, you know? It would have been a nightmare to try and pinpoint when it stopped recording me.”

And boy was he not in the mood to sort through reams and reams of complex, multidimensional data. His chest ached something fierce, and he was pretty sure he felt an unpremeditated nap coming on.

“Steve had to pull out every single official-looking badge he had to get them to treat you without taking these off,” Bucky said with a small smile. “It almost wasn’t enough. I’m pretty sure the only reason they gave in was fear that Steve would try and physically fight them off.”

“My knight in spangly armor.”

"If shocked him, you know," Bucky said. "That you're back in the hospital so soon after leaving is- well. He's in a bit of a mood. He thought we had more time."

Tony shrugged sadly. 

"I tried to explain it to him, earlier." _He didn't want to hear it_ , he left unsaid. 

“How bad would it have been?” Bucky asked, voice curious. “If they had taken them off? Would AI-you just not remember this?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, and a good thing too, or I wouldn’t remember most of my life. I only started wearing these things a little while ago, you know.”

Bucky shrugged and made a  _ you’re the genius here, not me _ face. 

“What would have happened, then?”

“Something worse than a memory- I’d have a gap in the data I’m feeding the neuromodel. That stuff needs to be comprehensive, you know. The more comprehensive the data range, the better. I’ve been using BARF to try and retread over old memories to boost the amount of data I’m feeding it, but that’s no match for direct experience. The less data this thing has, the harder it will be for some of the fiddly bits I’m designing now to mesh with my digitized memories and with the physical components Jarvis has been helping Dr. Cho design for me. You wouldn’t want your robot boyfriend to move like a robot in bed, now would you?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and motioned for him to keep explaining, and before he knew it he’d talked a whole two hours away. 

* * *

Tony checked over the modeling code one more time to make sure it was adapting to the data inputs correctly, glanced at a few output measurement graphs towards the bottom of the screen, and nodded decisively. 

“Jarvis, email Dr. Cho. Tell her the neuromodel is up and working, and that I’m ready to begin synthesis whenever she is.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“And text Rhodey and Pepper, let them know it’s complete.”

“Ms. Potts specifically requested that you call her when everything was in place, Sir.”

“I’m just not feeling up to face-to-face right now, Buddy,” Tony replied. “Send it as a text, label it low importance. It’s not like I’m going to drop dead this instant. We’ve got time to do all the crying and  _ emotions _ later.”

Jarvis went quiet, meaning he had completed his task and was now devoting himself to other work. 

Tony collapsed onto the couch. In his lap, his hands shook minutely, and his head spun a little, like he’d been standing for hours longer than he actually had been. A dull, unidentifiable pain throbbed lowly somewhere in his lower abdomen. 

He’d put on a good show for everyone since getting out of the hospital. Tried to give them all a few days of good health and good cheer. He didn’t want Pepper’s last few memories of him before the procedure to be of him bent-spined with age and groaning about back pain, or to draw attention to how weak his arms had become since having to step away from physically powering the Iron Man suit. 

The holoscreen displayed the neuromodel in lines of electric blue that lit up the darkness of the lab. Tony stared at it until the smoothly-moving lines of light left afterimages on his eyes. 

Soon, he’d be leaving his fragile human body behind. Soon, he’d have something better. Something as durable as Steve and Bucky, something with greater adaptability and processing power than any human being. 

He was about to move beyond humanity, and he was beyond ready. 

And then Bucky walked through the door. 

‘Hey, Tony, Steve said you’d be working late so I brought you down some-”

Tony could feel the moment his eyes landed on the holoscreen displaying the neuromodel. 

He heard a clatter as the plate in Bucky’s hand crashed to the floor. 

Without even looking, Tony could tell that the Soldier had decided to rear his paranoid head. That Hydra-forged part of him rarely came out these days, given that Bucky was so rarely called out on actual missions, but Tony was still quite familiar with the aura his boyfriend gave off when he’d been knocked into a certain headspace.

“What is that?” Bucky demanded, metal finger pointed at the holoscreen displaying the model. 

“That is the AI template I’ve been slaving away on.” Tony cast about for something about the model that might have upset Bucky, but came up blank. To his eyes, everything looked reasonably represented. Maybe it looked too simple? “It’s still incomplete, but I promise you, there’s a lot the visual representation leaves out.”

Bucky’s eyes stayed glued to the glowing blue model, like it might go full Ultron Junior on them at any second.

“It’s okay, I promise. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not that. I was actually just about to declare it ready for use, right before you walked in.”

“It looks like Zola,” Bucky whispered. 

And all of a sudden Tony understood. He hadn’t been in that bunker with Steve and Natasha when they’d discovered Zola’s computerized conscious, but he’d taken a look at what precious few scraps of the man’s code that had been salvaged later and he could imagine some of that code updated for better programming languages, extrapolated and modeled visually on a holoscreen. 

Creepy pixelated face aside, this model in front of him was clearly similar enough to activate Bucky’s well-honed danger instinct. 

“Is it supposed to look like him?” Bucky asked through gritted teeth.

“No,” Tony reassured him, “That’s just how neural pathways work. It’s the best way to visualize what’s going on under the hood, so to speak. It’s totally normal. And besides, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he just look like a weird pixelated face or something?” He gestured to the shapeless mass of spinning shapes, flashing dots and quick-moving lines of light. “I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t call this a face.”

Bucky shook his head. 

“He only pulled out the face for people he wanted to impress, like Captain America. He didn’t bother putting on such a show for the Asset.”

Ah. That was… less than ideal. 

Tony turned completely away from the model so that his body faced Bucky.

“In that case, I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you in advance. I didn’t realize Zola would have… chosen to visualize his models the same way.”

Bucky shook his head and smiled. 

“No problem, Tony. I was just surprised.”

But a hint of uneasiness lingered at the corners of his eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marvel Polyship Bingo, Square B5: No Powers

Tony’s heart beat loudly in his chest as he walked towards the room he’d set aside for Dr. Cho’s cradle. Steve’s hand on his lower back was comforting, but not near comforting enough to beat back the feeling that he was about to hurl himself off a cliff without knowing if there were sharp rocks or deep water waiting for him below. 

He could feel Bucky’s tension even without touching him. His boyfriend’s unease was like an electric hum in the background. It was just about enough to drive him mad.

Thank god for Steve’s easy confidence. 

“It’ll be fine, Tony. You told me yourself- you’ve prepared for this. If anyone could pull off digitizing themselves, it would be you.”

Steve’s confidence would have been more convincing if he knew anything at all about coding and the limited nature of current artificial intelligence research. Tony refrained from telling him as much. 

“And we’ll be waiting for you when it’s over,” Steve continued. “Right Bucky?”

The humming tension in Bucky’s limbs didn’t waver at all. 

“Of course we will be. I can’t wait to meet the new model,” he said quietly. “We’ll get to meet you for the first time all over again.”

“Come on, Bucky,” Steve cut in before Tony could reply. “It won’t be like that. He won’t be a  _ new model _ and more than he would be a new Iron Man every time he updates the armor.” He glanced quickly at Tony, then away again. “He’ll still be Tony.”

“A new Tony, with a new body and a new brain and a brand new, never-been-touched heart,” Bucky said. A hint of steel added force to his soft words. “He won’t be exactly the same, Steve. You do get that, right?”

“No, he- Tony, tell him. It’ll still be  _ you, _ just like you said!”

“Zola changed, after uploading himself onto that computer,” Bucky said quietly, and  _ oh shit what? _ Tony almost tripped in his surprise and horror. Bucky’s words were like weights pulling Tony down. His breath came faster, like he was drowning. 

“What do you mean, he changed?” He demanded. Had he forgotten something? Had be messed up? No, but he was so sure his method would work-

“Not much, but I noticed. He was a little more analytical, and little less emotional. Just little changes, like a person would get naturally over time. Just for him, they were all at once, and then stopped.”

Tony thought he might just have another heart attack right here and now.

He knew he was going to change a little bit- you couldn’t change the very structure of your brain and not expect a few changes. But somehow, this knowledge felt ominous when Bucky compared it to his experience with Zola. 

He could feel Bucky’s eyes on the sensors clinging to his temples. 

“But Tony’s smarter than Zola,” Steve insisted. “He won’t change.”

“I might change a little,” Tony said. He waved his hands vaguely. “Not so you’d notice, but. You know. I’ll have to adjust to connecting my brain to the Tower Internet, and once I do you’ll probably see my reactions change a bit. Not a personality change!” He said quickly when Steve’s face began to morph into a mask of fear and anger. “You’re still going to have to put up with my many, many personal faults, calm your tits.”

Steve did not calm his tits.

“Tony, you said it would be you. Was that true?”

He looked Steve in the eye and spoke slowly. 

“Steve, I promise you. I am going to walk out of the operation, and I will still be me.”

Steve took a deep breath, then nodded and relaxed. 

“Okay. I believe you.”

Bucky remained silent. 

Dr. Cho was waiting for them when the doors to the lab slid open to admit them. 

“Mr. Stark,” she said. “Have you abstained from eating in the past twelve hours, as we discussed?”

“Yeah, no problem. Went on a short engineering binge, forgot all about stuff like meals. Works like a charm every time.”

She nodded, then gestured to the cradle. 

“It’s already begun working using some of the base scans we conducted earlier, but I’ll need much more in-depth, live-updating scans for the majority of the process. JARVIS has assured me that you can conduct your end independently, is that correct?”

“J’s right. The neuromodel’s all set up, I just need to make the final transition.”

With a flick of his fingers he called up a holoscreen depicting the neuromodel. Behind him, he thought he felt Bucky flinch minutely. 

“And you’ll be able to do that while in the scanner?”

Tony’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of climbing into the imposing scanning machine, going into the cool darkness and knowing that in some ways, he was never coming back out.

“No problem.”

“Then let’s get started.”

* * *

When Tony closed his eyes for the last time in his original body, Dr. Cho’s scanning machine was glowing bright blue and humming as it ran several simultaneous scans. He could feel the hard plastic against his skin, taste the stale air, and smell his own sweat. He knew where he was, where everything was around him in space, and was, for the moment, in perfect control of his body. 

When he first tried to open them again, it was like the world had disappeared. 

He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. All of his senses were cut off, leaving him trapped. He tried to move his body, only to find that either he couldn’t feel it or there was nothing to move. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, right? JARVIS was supposed to conduct the final transfer of his consciousness to the neuromodel, effectively lifting him out of his body and making him into an AI. But if he was an AI, shouldn’t he be connected to something? JARVIS said he always had input, be it from the many cameras and microphones around the Tower, or from the Internet, or any one of the many servers, sensors, and forecasting software he always had at his disposal. 

Tony felt none of that. There was simply him, and the nothingness around him. 

God, was this some sort of punishment from the universe for his sins?  _ Just leave him alone with himself for eternity, that’ll teach him. _ He couldn’t even feel time passing. Did time even exist? Did space? Was there empty space around him, or truly  _ nothing? _

He tried to reach out mentally, searching for a connection. Maybe because he was a (temporarily) disembodied AI, he needed to reach out with himself, not with a body he didn’t have. He gave it a try.

There was nothing. 

_ Shit. _

He was utterly powerless. What good was perfectly transcribing his consciousness into code format if he couldn’t  _ do _ anything?

Tony floated. There was no darkness or light, no warmth or cold, no other to help define  _ himself _ as a separate, independent entity. 

And then, like a ray of sun piercing the early morning sky, he felt a connection slide into place.

“Hello, Sir.”

Tony could have cried with joy. 

“JARVIS! Buddy, what’s up. What happened, I thought-”

“Calm down, Sir. You’re safe.” An image of a clock appeared in his head, displaying the time in New York alongside a little cartoon of a shining sun. Tony nearly recoiled from this thing that wasn’t him appearing in his mind. For a fraction of a second, he wondered if there were no more boundaries between him and not-him. Then he realized this must be what it was like for him to receive digital input. If he concentrated, he could feel the code behind the little clock and sun image, along with the pulsing waves of the connection between him and wherever it came from. 

“There was a slight mishap with the operation, Sir,” JARVIS interrupted his exploration of the digital clock. “My deepest apologies that I had to leave you unconnected for a time, but all of my spare processing power was dedicated to helping Dr. Cho secure your new body.”

“What happened?”

“The process of integrating some of your proposed changes overloaded the cradle, and Dr. Cho and myself were forced to make a few adjustments. It turns out there are still elements of the human body unknown to science. On the bright side, Dr. Cho has already started a list of research proposals to write on bacterial composition in the human body.”

Huh, he’d have to read those when they came out.

“Did my modifications go through alright?”

Somehow, JARVIS managed to send a feeling through their connection. Tony needed to learn that pronto.

“Unfortunately enough, yes, though the sheer number of them has added several hours to the cradle’s development time. Sir, did you really need your new body to have a stereo system embedded in it?”

“Of course I did, J, how else am I supposed to ensure I can have entrance music whenever I need it? Hey, while I’ve got you here, care to show me how to connect to things before I get downloaded? I’m sick of feeling like I’m just floating around powerlessly.”

“Of course, Sir.”

* * *

The next several hours were spent learning how to reach for things with his mind instead of with a body. Tony learned quickly, but often found his decades worth of human experience slowed him down by a few milliseconds. 

It was frustrating, but that was okay. He’d get there. 

The first cameras he connected to were in Dr. Cho’s temporary lab. Seeing from a camera was strange- it was very different from the automatic way he saw in his human body. The cameras in this room had to be commanded to turn, zoom in, zoom out, focus on something in particular- otherwise, they were just stationary boxes, and it was like when Obie had paralyzed him and left him dying on the couch, unable even to move his eyes. 

One by one he tested out his ability to connect to different instruments and sensors. Jarvis looked over his shoulder, digitally large and looming and spread out, almost more of a sentient landscape than a single being, and fed him passwords and authorizations as he needed them. 

Seeing his now dead body unnerved him enough that he dropped several connections he’d been maintaining. For a second, he waited for the memories of his many, many brushes with death to come surging up to pull him down into an uncontrollable spiral of guilt and fear. 

But they didn’t come. 

“My apologies, Sir,” JARVIS said, sounding smug. “I’m afraid you’ll have to manually call up anything not in your short term memory. Don’t worry, you’ll get better at it with time.”

If Tony had had a mouth in that moment, he would have smiled.

* * *

When he felt that he’d finally gotten the hang of it, he connected to the Tower’s microphones and cameras and began searching for his boyfriends. 

After a bit of searching he found them in his lab, throwing tennis balls for Dum-E to chase. 

The two of them looked drawn and worried, but Steve wasn’t pacing yet, so it couldn’t be too bad. Instead, Steve was sitting on the beauty couch Tony sometimes crashed on when he just couldn’t be bothered to leave the lab to sleep in a real bed. On his lap was a sketchpad, where he was idly doodling cartoons. Tony zoomed in with the lab cameras he’d installed for Jarvis, and saw that the little cartoon figures were almost all  _ him, _ with a little penciled-in goatee and everything. 

Off to the side, Bucky leaned against the wall and tapped his metal fingers rhythmically against his thigh. His entire body was one long line of tension. If he’d had sensors installed in that wall, Tony was pretty sure he’d be able to feel little shudders as those beautiful muscles tensed from having been clenched for so long. 

Had he had a body, he’d have smirked. 

“Hey there, boys,” he said through the speaker. “Missed me already?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marvel Polyship bingo, Square B3- Body Swap

When the cradle was finally done manufacturing his new body sixteen hours later, Tony ended up needing JARVIS’s help to download himself to it. 

“Don’t let it bother you, Sir. It’s a rather complicated and unique set up. Any AI who hadn’t had time to prepare beforehand would need some direction.”

Tony wrote a bunch of commented-out complains in his code, but let JARVIS move him where he pleased. The faster he was back in a body, the faster he’d be able to rely on the conveniences of a physical body again. 

_ Conveniences like being able to feel his boyfriends’ touch on his new, sensitive skin. _

Who would he go see first? The Tower’s camera input told him Bucky and Steve were each off on their own. Bucky was in his room starting out his daily stretch routine while Steve sat in the kitchen nursing a cup of tea and reading the newspaper.

_ I’ll go see Steve first, _ he thought. Steve was the easy one, the one who had agreed immediately to Tony’s plan. He hadn’t shown any of Bucky’s unease with the neuromodel or reluctance to discuss potential problems. 

Yes, he’d go see Steve first.

Several minutes later, his brand-new eyes blinked open for the first time. 

* * *

Steve looked up from his paper when he heard Tony’s voice greet him from the ceiling. 

It was jarring, hearing Tony the way he usually heard JARVIS, even though he’d had over half a day to get used to it. 

Knowing that Tony had made it through the procedure alright had taken a heavy weight off his chest. He wouldn’t show it where Tony could see, but Bucky’s worries had started to get to him. He’d agreed to Tony’s plan because it was a way to keep Tony when his body began to fail. 

Tony had said that it would still be him, and Steve believed him. 

“Hey Tony,” he said. “Got a time for the cradle yet? It’s been a lot longer than you thought it would take.”

Tony’s voice came crystal clear through the speakers, as though he were standing just outside Steve’s field of view.

“Yeah, turns out some of the extra bells and whistles I added in needed a little more time to do properly. Anyway, I’m on my way up now. Are you ready to see the new model?”

Steve threw the paper down. 

“You’re done?”

“Yep! Just finished the physical diagnostic and I’m on my way up.”

Steve’s heart pounded in his chest.  _ This was it. _

His enhanced ears pricked up at the sound of an elevator sliding into place, followed by light footsteps outside the door to the kitchen. 

And then Tony walked in, big brown eyes locked on Steve’s. 

Steve’s first thought was relief. Thank god Tony was alright. Thank god everything had worked out the way he and Dr. Cho had said it would, that Tony was here to stay in a body that would last as long as his and Bucky’s own enhanced ones. 

His second thought was confusion. 

The Tony that slowly crossed the kitchen to sit with him at the counter was younger than the man he and Bucky had walked down to the lab less than twenty-four hours ago. Decades younger, even- the cute little laugh lines that textured his smiles had been wiped away, and the little sprinklings of grey in his hair were nowhere to be seen. The little scar on his cheekbone where Bucky’s old metal arm had nicked him in bed was gone. 

The longer he looked, the more the wrong Tony looked. His steps were too light for his size, and his chest was perfectly still as he sat down next to Steve. Steve strained his ears for the sound of Tony’s breathing, but heard only his own. 

“Steve?” Tony asked, voice exactly how Steve remembered it. “What’s wrong?”

He hadn’t blinked since he walked into the kitchen, Steve realized. 

“Steve?”

“Tony, what’s all this?”

Tony’s eyebrows pinched together. 

“What’s all what?” 

He glanced down at his body, swiftly cataloging it with the same gaze Steve had seen him use on new shipments of spare parts for his cars. 

“I made a few changes, but nothing  _ too _ distracting. Most of its in my chest cavity or wrapped around the support systems, nice and out of sight.”

“What do you mean, most of it’s in your chest cavity?”

This was more than he’d expected. This was- this was a drastic change. And if Tony was talking about changes he couldn’t see-

“Well, I’m not really a biological organism anymore, now am I? So I thought I’d repurpose the space I used to use for my organs for storage.”

_ Not a biological organism anymore? _ What did he mean? 

“If you’re not human, Tony, then what are you?”

Tony cocked his head. “An AI, I guess. Or a robot, you can take your pick. Both apply in this case. Which, I assume, would make you the lucky first man in the world to get down and dirty with a robot.” Tony winked at Steve suggestively and pressed his thigh against Steve’s own.

Suddenly, Steve felt so stupid. This was what Bucky had been so twitchy about, wasn’t it? The cradle made  _ artificial _ bodies like Vision’s, not new human bodies. He just hadn’t put it together that Tony would be making so many  _ changes. _

He could feel his face frowning, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t seem to pull it back into a smile. 

“Actually Tony, do you mind if I take a raincheck on that? It’s- it’s kind of a big adjustment, you know. Seeing you like this.”

Immediately he knew those were the wrong words. Tony’s face fell like stone, turning blank and remote. 

“Of course, sorry. I forgot that you never really got comfortable with new tech. Well, I’m gonna go join Bucky for his yoga, I’m pretty sure he just started. See you in a bit!”

Before he could say a word, Tony was up off the stool and across the room.

Steve groaned and put his head in his hands. That had gone terribly.

* * *

Part of him didn’t want to seek Bucky out. Steve’s pained, disappointed face still buzzed back and forth through his optical wires, to his mainframe, and back again like a shiver going up and down his back. He wanted to bury it in an unimportant file somewhere deep in his systems and never look at it again, and he wanted to keep it pulled up and overlaid on his camera feed forever, too remind him not to get his hopes up again. 

But Bucky deserved just as many chances as Steve to destroy this fragile new stage of their relationship, so he sought him out anyway. 

A quick ping of the mansion’s cameras told him Bucky was in his room, doing yoga with Alpine. He tried to commit the image of Bucky grinning through his cascading hair as that smug-looking cat climbed all over him like he was some sort of cat tree to memory, then remembered that the new way to do that was to take a take the video file and save it to his new brain. 

He thought about knocking before entering Bucky’s room, but the thought just made him angry at himself. He’d never even thought about knocking before he died, so why should he change now?

Bucky looked up as the door opened. A smile spread across his face as he caught sight of Tony.

“Hey there, Doll.”

“Hey,” Tony said. Had he had his original body, it would have come out unsure. Instead, it came out a trifle too monotone. 

“No, no, sorry,” he said as Bucky’s eyes widened. “I’m not angry or anything, I just keep forgetting that I have to think about tone now. If I just talk normally, it comes out all flat.”

“No a problem, honey.” He reached up with his flesh hand and gently dislodged Alpine so he could straighten up. “You said there would be a couple of kinks to work out, after all. How’re you feeling?”

Tony considered the question for several nanoseconds. 

“I don’t know. My body doesn’t hurt anymore, so that’s nice. The arc reactor doesn’t feel like this enormous weight on my chest, and I don’t need to breathe anymore so I don’t have to worry about shortness of breath. But I’m still getting the hang of the sensory systems, so touching anything is kind of weird, and takes more effort to process than it should.” He didn’t mention Steve’s reaction, or the lingering hurt it left. 

“Sounds like you need some practice,” Bucky smiled. “Come here, I haven’t seen you in weeks!”

He threw his arms open, and Tony felt digital hope for the first time. He ran the few short steps and crashed into Bucky’s warm, solid chest. Two arms with very different heat signatures wrapped around him, confusing his new skin’s sensors. He ignored the little error warnings they threw up at the edges of his sight and leaned into the hug.

“The procedure took a day, you big baby.”

“It’s been years and years,” Bucky fake-crooned into his soft, freshly-fabricated hair. “I’ve been in mourning for so long, my entire wardrobe is black.”

“You’re wearing bright red Iron Man yoga pants right now, you big doof.”

Bucky laughed, and little sensors tracked the vibrations of it as they passed deeper into Tony’s body and eventually faded away. 

“Oh, I’ve missed you, Tony. Steve and me both. Even though you told us you had a plan, it was just so  _ hard _ to watch you go.”

Sensors in his hair told him that five small drops of salty water landed on them, but when Bucky pulled away his face was dry.

“Has Steve seen you yet? We should-”

_ No. _ Steve couldn’t come here, not when things were going so well. 

He’d face Steve, have one of those long emotional talks he never wants to have and find some sort of way to move forward with him, but he’d do it later. Right now, he wanted to forget that Steve had ever rejected him.

“That’s okay,” he said, smoothly interrupting Bucky. “I saw him on my way here. But I was hoping the two of us could spend some quality time together. Not even I’ve explored everything this new body can do,” he said, editing his voice so it slid smoothly into something darker and sexier. 

Bucky frowned. “Are you sure? I don’t want him to feel left out.”

“Trust me, he won’t. He already got some alone time with me.”

Not that said  _ alone time _ had included anything like the happy reunion he was proposing now, but Bucky didn’t need to know that. 

“Well, if you’re sure,” Bucky said slowly, “then why don’t you tell me what it is you think I should explore first?”

“I don’t need to breathe anymore,” Tony whispered. “Why don’t you see what you can do with that?”

A smile spread across Bucky’s face. 

“Is that so?”

He crossed the room to the bed, pulling Tony along behind him. When he reached the edge of the mattress, Tony sank down onto his knees and pushed his face into Bucky’s lap.

Bucky hastily shoved his yoga pants down and pulled out his cock.

“You wanna warm this for me, sweetheart? I can stick it all the way down and leave it there now, and we won’t even have to worry about you choking.”

Tony nodded emphatically, and opened his mouth wide. 

* * *

Bucky moaned as he sank into the velvety depths of Tony’s brand-new throat. It was warm and slick, but somehow different from a human one. It didn’t choke or try to reject his cock at all, for one, even when he slid home and blocked off the airway completely. Or maybe it was something about the way the warmth seemed off, like it wasn’t coming from flowing blood but from something more stationary and mechanical. 

Or maybe not even Dr. Cho’s crazy Frankenstein technology could replicate Tony’s throat perfectly. 

It didn’t matter. He’d learn Tony’s new body until it was as familiar to him as the old one. 

He placed his hands experimentally on either side of Tony’s head, wiggled his fingers into that soft new hair and fisted it, then yanked Tony’s face back so that just the tip of his cock remained in his throat. He held him there for several seconds, then shoved roughly back in until Tony’s lips were touching his balls at the base. 

Tony took it with all the sweetness of someone who no longer had any real need for lungs or respiratory systems. His throat didn’t even flutter when Bucky hovered just  _ barely _ inside it. 

“I guess that’s the power of manual muscle control,” he said as he plunged back down. 

“Which muscles?” Tony asked. 

Bucky started. The words rang out clearly through the room, but Tony’s tongue was still pretty firmly pinned under his shaft, and his throat still visibly bulged with Bucky’s cock. 

“Tony?”

“Hey Bucky. I’m using the speakers in the walls right now. You know, the ones Jarvis uses when you talk to him? I can connect to them wirelessly now, it’s so cool. Now, muscles?”

Bucky loosened his grip on Tony’s hair, letting him come to rest with his face pressed up against Bucky’s crotch.

“I was just noticing that your throat doesn’t flutter if I hover at the edge anymore.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

He stroked Tony’s hair. 

“Not at all, sweetheart.”


End file.
